The Flattening: Part 2

How Cruelty Became the Default

It began with petty refusals. A man claimed the last empty chair with his laptop bag, as if he’d already decided the room was his. An old woman stood beside him,waiting, patient, unseen. No one moved. That small withholding, the fixed stare at a screen, the practiced indifference, was more than discourtesy. It was structure. A kind of syntax. A moral grammar made not of what is said, but what is withheld: the turned face, the unoffered gesture, the smirk passed between strangers. I used to think that kind of cruelty was ambient, something absorbed like smoke. I see now it was something else. Deliberate. Learned.

Because the flattening is not just cultural. It is political. It has a strategy. A budget. A ballot. It has a candidate.

What follows is not a policy analysis. It is a record of air grown thick. The smell of smoke in places that were once familiar. The way people talk now, or do not. What they need to hear. What they already believe. And what they are willing to destroy to be told it again.

The Smell of Smoke

I have been thinking about the smell of smoke.

Not the sharp acrid bite of a house fire, but something else entirely: the persistent haze that hangs in the air when something fundamental has shifted, when the story we tell ourselves about who we are has begun to burn at the edges. In 2024, this smell was everywhere. In the polling places. In the coffee shops. In the quiet spaces between what people said and what they meant.

In Nebraska there was something I could not name.

The man I met there had worked thirty years at a packing house that no longer existed. His hands were still thick from decades of labor that no longer mattered. When I asked him why he voted for Trump, he said, “He tells it like it is.” When I asked what that meant, he looked past me toward the empty lot where the slaughterhouse used to stand.

“Most folks don’t listen anymore,” he said. “They don’t hear us. He hears us.”

What struck me was not what he heard, but what he needed to hear. That his anger had a name. That his loss had a witness. That his invisibility was not his fault.

This is the story I want to tell, though I am not sure I know how to tell it.

The Arithmetic of Grievance

The conventional wisdom suggests that people vote their interests.

The conventional wisdom is wrong, or at least incomplete. People vote their stories, and stories are not subject to the same arithmetic as tax policy or healthcare premiums.

Consider the woman I met in Iowa. She worked two jobs. Her husband had been disabled in an accident that their insurance barely covered. They lived in a house that was worth less than they owed on it, in a town where the main street was mostly empty storefronts. By any rational calculation, they should have voted for the candidates who promised expanded healthcare, who pushed for minimum wage increases, who spoke about economic justice.

They did not.

When I asked why, she said something that stayed with me. “It’s not about what he does. It’s about who he is. He’s not afraid to say the things we think but can’t say.”

I have been thinking about what she meant by this. What were the things she thought but could not say? They were not expressions of economic anxiety or cultural displacement. They were expressions of racial resentment so deep, so foundational, that they had become the organizing principle of her political identity.

The things she could not say were that she believed some people deserved their suffering. That she thought some families were less worthy of healthcare than others. That she felt some children were less deserving of good schools. That she was convinced some neighborhoods were meant to be abandoned. That she was certain some lives simply mattered less.

Her vote was not about recognition. It was about hierarchy. It was not about being heard. It was about others being silenced. It was not about justice. It was about maintaining injustice.

This is what we refuse to acknowledge. That the politics of grievance is not just about being heard. It is about being heard while others are told to shut up. It is about reclaiming a sense of importance by ensuring that other people remain unimportant. It is about feeling powerful by keeping others powerless.

The woman in Iowa was not just voting for recognition. She was voting for the right to say what she had always believed. That America was meant for people who looked like her, thought like her, worshipped like her. That everyone else was a guest at best, an invader at worst.

This is the arithmetic of grievance.

My dignity requires your humiliation.
My belonging requires your exclusion.
My story requires your silence.
But more than that.
My whiteness requires your otherness.
My citizenship requires your foreignness.
My Christianity requires your blasphemy.

It is an arithmetic that only works when someone is left out of the equation entirely.

The Collapse of Common Meaning

I have been thinking about the words we no longer agree on.

Words like patriot. Truth. Freedom. Once shared. Now claimed. Once arguments about policy. Now arguments about reality. What does it mean when two people say the word America and mean entirely different things?

Language, once a bridge, has become a battlefield. The word democracy can now mean voter suppression or election integrity depending on the speaker. Freedom can mean the right to bear arms or the right to live free from gun violence. Even the word truth has become suspect. Something curated rather than discovered.

The fragmentation of language is not collateral damage. It is strategy. If you dismantle the words, you dismantle the possibility of agreement. If everything is subjective, then nothing is binding.

Trump mastered this better than any policy. He made language slippery. He made facts optional. He made cruelty sound like candor. And in the absence of common meaning, hate became the only thing everyone could understand.

The Geography of Belonging

There is a map of America that exists only in the imagination, but it is more real than any atlas.

On this map, there are places where people matter and places where they do not. Places where the story of America is still being written and places where it has already been edited out.

Trump understood this geography in ways that policy papers could not capture. When he said Make America Great Again, he was not offering a legislative agenda. He was offering a return to a time when certain people, white people specifically, did not have to justify their place in the story.

Let me be more precise about what this means. The America that Trump promised to restore was not simply a place where white people mattered more. It was a place where white people mattered because other people did not matter at all. It was not nostalgia for prosperity. It was nostalgia for hierarchy. It was not longing for community. It was longing for caste.

The geography of belonging in twenty-first-century America is a landscape built on exclusion. Every neighborhood association that fights affordable housing. Every school board that bans books about slavery. Every voter ID law that makes it harder for certain people to vote. Every gerrymandered district that ensures the right people stay in power.

This is not accidental. This is intentional. This is the system working as designed.

The people who flocked to Trump’s rallies were not just seeking recognition. They were seeking restoration. Restoration of a social order in which their whiteness guaranteed their place in line.

This is what we have been afraid to confront.

That the politics of grievance is not about economics.
It is about race.
It is not about being left behind.
It is about other people moving ahead.
It is not about losing something.
It is about other people gaining something.

The map they wanted to redraw was not geographical. It was racial. And they were willing to destroy democracy to preserve demography.

The Vocabulary of Faith

I kept thinking about the evangelical women who defended Trump’s moral failings by saying God uses imperfect vessels. This phrase appeared everywhere. In interviews. In church bulletins. In social media posts. As if it had been focus grouped for maximum theological efficiency.

But what struck me was not the theology but the psychology. These women were not defending Trump so much as they were defending their own need to believe in something larger than themselves.

They had spent their lives in churches that promised them certainty. That told them there was a plan. That assured them they were chosen.

When the churches began to empty, when the certainties began to crumble, they did not lose their need for faith. They simply redirected it. Trump became their imperfect vessel not because he was holy but because he was willing to be their champion in a world that seemed increasingly hostile to everything they had been taught to value.

This was not faith. It was nostalgia weaponized into theology. It was the liturgy of resentment.

The Theater of Masculinity

I have been thinking about the performance of strength.

The men who flocked to Trump rallies were not, by any objective measure, powerful men. They were men who had been laid off. Divorced. Diminished. They were men whose fathers had been able to support families on single incomes. Who had grown up believing that hard work guaranteed dignity. Who had discovered that the rules they had been taught no longer applied.

Trump offered them a different set of rules. In his world, strength was not about providing or protecting. It was about dominating. It was about the ability to say whatever you wanted to say and damn the consequences.

This cruelty was not incidental to his appeal. It was central to it. It proved that he could be cruel without consequence.

This was not traditional masculinity. It was masculinity emptied of duty. It was not about being diminished. It was about being equalized.

The Mascot

Trump was not a leader. He was a mascot. A vessel for borrowed rage. A man who played a man who could never be humiliated because he had already surrendered to humiliation long ago.

The performance was not strength. It was the theater of immunity. And for men who had once ruled their homes, their factories, their small towns, this performance was enough. Not real power. Just the illusion of permanence.

The Silence of Policy

While Trump was performing strength, the Republicans were passing bills.

The Big Beautiful Bill that emerged from the Republican controlled Senate was everything that Trump’s base said the country needed. Massive tax cuts for corporations. Expanded oil drilling permits. Immigration restrictions. What they called parental rights legislation. It was comprehensive. Well coordinated. Ruthlessly effective.

It was also a blueprint for exclusion.

The bill was covered in the newspapers. Debated on television. Analyzed in think tanks. But what was not covered was how precisely it had been crafted to reward some Americans while punishing others. It was the kind of policy that worked quickly. Visibly. Deliberately. The kind that showed up in lives rather than statistics.

The connection was not accidental. Policy had become the language of grievance. And in America, grievance had become more powerful than governance.

The Democrats, meanwhile, were performing opposition. They held hearings. Wrote op-eds. Gave speeches about democracy and norms and the rule of law. They spoke the language of institutions to people who had lost faith in institutions. They offered procedural objections to substantive cruelty. They brought fact-checkers to a knife fight.

This faith in process over power was not politically neutral. It was the faith of people who believed that the system would eventually correct itself. That extremism would eventually exhaust itself. That America would eventually return to its senses. It was the faith of people who had never experienced American democracy as a threat to their existence.

The people who voted for Trump were not rejecting Democratic policy because there was no Democratic policy to reject. They were embracing Republican policy because it offered them something that Democratic process could not: the promise that their resentments would be translated into other people’s suffering.

This is what we have been reluctant to acknowledge. That the Big Beautiful Bill was not a policy failure. It was a policy success. It successfully channeled racial resentment into legislative action. It successfully transformed cultural anxiety into economic advantage. It successfully converted the fear of demographic change into the reality of political dominance.

The bill was not an accident. It was the logical conclusion of a political movement that had spent decades learning how to use the language of governance to achieve the goals of supremacy.

The Weight of Waiting

I have been thinking about the particular cruelty of incremental change.

Democratic policy works slowly. A bill becomes law. Then regulation. Then implementation. Then, eventually, relief. But people who are drowning cannot wait for the tide to turn. They need someone to throw them a rope, and they need it now.

Trump offered them a rope. It was not a real rope. It was made of anger and resentment and false promises. But it felt solid in their hands. It gave them something to hold onto while they waited for the water to recede.

But that rope was also a noose. What Trump offered was not rescue. It was revenge. Not help. Hate. Not a way out. A way to drag others down.

The Democrats, meanwhile, were not offering ropes at all. They were offering studies. They were commissioning reports on why people were drowning instead of pulling them out of the water. They were holding hearings about water safety while people were going under for the third time.

This is the tragedy of American politics. The distance between what people need and what institutions can provide. Between the urgency of pain and the patience of process. But it is also something else. The distance between what white people expect and what everyone else has always known. That the system was never designed to save them.

The people who voted for Trump were not drowning. They were standing on the shore. Watching other people drown. Demanding someone explain to them why they should care. The water they were afraid of was not poverty or joblessness or addiction. It was the possibility that they might have to share the lifeboat.

The rope Trump threw them was not a rescue line. It was a way to pull others underwater. And they grabbed it eagerly. Gratefully. Righteously.

Because the cruelty was not a side effect.
The cruelty was the point.

The Country We Might Become

There is an America that still believes in repair. In building something from the wreckage. In policy that serves more than punishes. In institutions that bend toward fairness rather than force.

That America is quieter. More fragile. More easily mocked. It speaks in full sentences. It waits its turn. It brings receipts.

But it is real.

I have seen it in the community centers in Phoenix where volunteers bring bottled water to polling places in July heat. In the school board meetings where exhausted parents stay past midnight to defend the right of their children to read about lives unlike their own. In the battered legal clinics where young lawyers write briefs no one will read in time. I have seen it in the protests. The vigils. The silence that refuses to give up.

It is not enough. But it is something.
It is not loud. But it is listening.
It is not innocent. But it is trying.

And that, maybe, is the difference.

Trump offered a story that ended. That closed the book. That cast the villains and assigned the heroes and locked the door behind them.

But this other America,this slow and stumbling and maddeningly imperfect country that some still believe we could become,keeps the story open. It makes no promises. It demands participation. It allows for change.

It does not need to be told. It is willing to learn.

The Arithmetic of Grief

In the end, we are left with the numbers.

Seventy five million for Harris.
Seventy seven million for Trump.
Another year lost. Another bill passed. Another truth buried beneath another spectacle.

But numbers do not tell stories. People do.

And what the people have told us, again and again, is this:

That they do not want justice.
They want supremacy.
That they do not want inclusion.
They want immunity.
That they do not want to be saved.
They want to be obeyed.

The rest of us will have to decide what to do with that truth. Whether we will keep pretending that the fire is only smoke. Whether we will keep pretending that this is politics as usual. Whether we will keep pretending that the center can hold.

Or whether we will finally name what we have been watching.

Not just a grievance movement.
Not just a cult of personality.
Not just disinformation.

But a politics of hate.
A strategy of harm.
A white nationalism that dares not speak its name but speaks it in every silence, every budget line, every ballot cast.

The need to be told is real. The hunger for meaning. The ache for dignity.

But it is also a need to dominate. A need to punish. A need to feel powerful no matter the cost.

And that cost, now, is all around us.

In the air.
In the water.
In the stories we no longer believe but cannot stop telling.
In the children who will grow up in a country that let this happen twice.
In the silence we mistake for peace.
And in the smoke.
Still there.
Still rising.
Still waiting to be named.

We will tell ourselves that it is complicated, that both sides are flawed, that democracy is messy and people are scared. We will reach for euphemisms the way children reach for nightlights. But we know what we have seen. We know what the smoke means. And if we are still willing to breathe it, still willing to name it, then maybe the story isn’t over yet. Maybe the country we might become still has a chance to become itself.

The Flattening: Part 2 is about the quiet erosion we all witness and the small, often unseen acts that push back against it. Writing like this takes time and care, and it exists because some of us refuse to look away.

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— Tom Joad